Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2003 10:49:51 -0800
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: RE: (urth) DOORS: The hive-like society

Jeff Veyera wrote:
>I ascribe women's hatred of the dolls to hatred of competition.  In
>Otherworld, competition is literally killer.  In our world, a woman
>typically competes against other women for the affections of one man.  In
>Otherworld, where copulation equals death for the male, she must not only
>compete with the other unattached women, but ALL women who wish to have a
>child.  On top of this, men, fearing death, have taken to Goddess worship
>and the safe companionship of dolls to fill the void typically filled by
>women.  Is it any wonder they'd be so angry at the very sight of a doll?

I can go along with that, but I'd add that there must be plenty of
Otherworld women who do not want children, either because they do not want
to commit murder or simply because they do not want the hassle of
parenting.  That is to say, I think that TAD shows a world where
reproduction involves pre-fathers following Love/Death and pre-mothers
following Power, and the other men and women being pretty much the mass of
non-reproductive society, getting on with their lives.

>I also wonder whether it is ejaculation or intercourse with a woman which
>brings on death.  I suspect the latter, or one nocturnal emission would be
>the end of civilization.

Ah, well we are in agreement on that one: two against the world!  But their
argument, iirc, is that Otherworld males are as biologically different from
Earth males as O-females are from E-females -- so O-males are chaste and
pure (until a pre-mother does something which activates them) where E-males
are not . . . which leads Roy Lackey to suggest, iirc, that the masculinist
revolution in Otherworld could scarcely form.

>This would also lend more strength to my argument above, and to your notion
>that North might be homosexual.  It would certainly follow in any society
>where heterosexual sex meant death that a large number might prefer the
>alternative.

Right, but in theory the Otherworld gays could be "Platonic" lovers (where
Platonic is in its Victorian sense of being completely non-physical, as
opposed to the, ahem, satyricon of Plato's Retreat or the gay understanding
of the party in Plato's SYMPOSIUM).  So they could be virgin gays.

=mantis=



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